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Tree Investigation!
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On the Fall Equinox, we went on a walk to appreciate the trees and leaves of the Sunset Neighbourhood. Absorbing the colours, making leaf and bark rubbings, smelling the pine needles and juniper berries, and inspecting carefully with a magnifying glass.
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| making some leaf rubbings |
We realized in putting this walk together that all of these tools - notebooks and pens, magnifying glasses and pauses to smell - are a kind of slowing technology: they ask us to take our time, to look and look again, to reconsider expectations about what something is or does or can do. These walks are not complicated, but they can be difficult in as much as taking time with things is difficult. Once we open ourselves to the vastness available in a single leaf, it can be hard to get anywhere on time!
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| traversing |
There were so many surprising things to be found: spider webs woven between trees high above our heads, the way some bark catches seed and leaves from nearby trees, a root turned into a teeny reflecting pool that perfectly held a fallen pile of moss, a pod that exploded into a thousand tiny airplane-like seeds. It also surprising just how much our group stood out!
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| dead trees... |
No one is shocked to see children with fists full of colourful leaves or noses buried in bushes, but grown humans doing the same cause passersby to ask "what we are doing," "who we work for," or if we know that the cawing of crows means a raccoon may be nearby. Sometimes I wish our silence was more visible, and more infectious. I imagine everyone getting slower and more quiet until all the tiny things can be heard clearly.
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| Our favourite tree at the centre! |
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| Sharing our collections of leaves, nuts, leaf rubbings, and moss. |
In a strange way, we found some of this quiet in our sharing together back in the lobby. Originally we thought this walk would involve some poetry writing - beneath trees and at the walk's conclusion - but it seemed more natural to sit and observe together out of the rain. In sharing our collections we also shared our ways of looking and being in the world. Without planning, we quietly shared stories of where we lived, how we had come to the neighbourhood, and what was next. At the end of the night, we gathered the left behind leaves and sticks and seeds and set them outside behind the centre. They, like all the other fallen pieces of fall, will get wet with rain and return to the earth. And we? Well I hope we are all patient enough to watch and listen and notice what happens.
